The Escapees RV Club is holding its 57th Escapade rally this week at the Pima County Fairgrounds in Tucson, Arizona, and I’ve been reading a lot of things about it on Facebook and on the blogs of people who are attending. It sounds like we are missing all the fun. Maybe next year we will be able to make it to Escapade. We’ve been to a lot of them over the years and always had a great time.

In fact, it was at an Escapade in Lancaster, California during our first year on the road that I got drafted into presenting my first seminar. Before that I always had a terrible fear of public speaking, even though I was a firearms instructor in the Army. There, they had to listen to me. But this was a different story. What if the audience hated me? What if they all got up and walked out in the middle of my seminar?

I was so nervous that I could not sleep the night before and I threw up three times walking from our motorhome to the building where I was going to be doing the seminar. And once I got on stage I was talking as fast as I could, just to get it over with. Someone in the audience asked me to please slow down, because nobody could understand me. I just blurted out, “I’m sorry, but you people scare the hell out of me.” Everybody started laughing, and suddenly I was completely comfortable. Since then I’ve given hundreds of seminars and spoken to audiences of over 1,000 people many times and love it. Hopefully I’ll be asked to do some more seminars at an Escapade down the road sometime.

Ever since we got Terry’s Glimakra loom set up she has been trying to figure out how to make it work. It’s a huge, complicated thing with hundreds of heddles, a bunch of foot pedals, and more parts and pieces than I could ever understand. And unlike the Baby Wolf loom she has been using, the Glimakra with its shaft switching is rather uncommon and she hasn’t been able to find a lot of instructional stuff on the Internet, like she has with her other looms.

But Terry loves a challenge, and through trial and error she’s getting the hang of it. She’s working on her first simple project now, a rug, and I think it’s going to come out nice. I can’t wait to see how it looks when she is finished.

Have you ever been on a cruise? We haven’t, but many of our friends have, and it’s always been on my bucket list. In fact, a while back there was some talk of me doing some seminars on cruise ships. Who knows? Maybe I’ll give that a shot one of these days.

Meanwhile, if you want to read about some adventures on the high seas on a cruise ship, my friend Ken Rossignol’s The Privateer Clause is currently free on Amazon. It’s the first of seven books in his Marsha and Danny Jones thriller series, about a couple who retired from law enforcement and took a cruise, and the next thing they knew they were working as security consultants for the cruise line, dealing with terrorists, killers, and sinister crewmen. Download a free copy today, I bet you get hooked on the series, too.

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Thought For The Day – Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him. ~H.L. Mencken

9 Responses to “Missing All The Fun”

I really enjoy your blog. We are 40 somethings with 2 grade school boys. We just got back from our annual rv trip to Florida from Minnesota. Because of your blog we took a drive to New Smyrna Beach so we could drive on the beach. The boys thought that was the bees knees!

My Grandparents had a “Rug Loom” and MS Terry’s looks a lot like it.
No instructions and they have been gone 25 years. That rug she is making brings back a lot of memories of the rug they made. They even made rugs out of plastic bread wrappers back in the 1960s.

Joan and I were also at that Escaped, our first. We had met at Livingston in November when we both became Texans. Remember the mud and wearing trash bags on our feet. Good times. We are now living in Zephyrhills Fl.

We went on an ocean cruise with Viking around Europe. We have also been on a Viking river cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest. We discovered that we are not ocean cruisers but we loved the river cruise. On an ocean cruise there is nothing but lots of water. But the river cruise was wonderful because of the passing scenery. We also don’t play games or go to evening entertainment. So the ocean vessel was just a place to sleep and eat (food great) while we enjoyed the ports of call.
You can go out of Cape Canaveral as they have LOTS of different cruise companies and cruises. Prices are pretty low if you catch a cruise at the last minute. And for sure it’s more fun if you get a group of people to go rather than just being on your own.